How Whole Foods reinvented the supermarket by making organic produce a hot commodity

You may or may not be familiar with the Whole Foods mission—to sell you organic bananas, hormone-free meat and a host of other natural products that promote health and the environment. But for anyone who steps through the door of one of its stores, a secondary agenda becomes impossible to miss: Whole Foods is hell-bent on doing nothing less than delighting you.

The directive appears on the second line of the highly circulated list of core values, pithy mantras that trip off the tongues of the company's 40,000 devoted employees. The five-item diktat begins, "We sell the highest quality natural and...